Re: US Domain -- County Delegations

[bmanning () ISI EDU (Bill Manning)]

> Given the tremendous demand for short, "sexy" domain names, and that we only
> have 70,000 companies in .COM out of 25,000,000 mid-to-large-sized businesses
> in the United States, we are indeed fast approaching the point where domain
> names will no longer map meaningfully to the objects they identify.  Something
> like .US which is currently for individuals will have an even tougher time
> growing to 200,000,000+ individuals.  
.....
> So far I'm headed toward "Label.Hash.COM.US" where Label is something
> like SUN or IBM or VIX, Hash is a variable sized token generated from Label
> and intended to keep the single .COM.US domain from growing into a monster.
> "Label.Hash.COM.State.US" is also a possibility, that's up to the USDOMREG.
> Closing .COM and moving to this new structure is going to be a huge
> undertaking, of course.

This idea (that domains can get too large) was the idea behind the bigzone
mailing list.  John Romkey was the first (to my knowledge) to propose a
series of psudo-random labels to create enough heirarchy to support the size
and scope of wide scale deployment.

Other efforts, to improve the information packing density of the existing 
labels (wildcards within labels, hierarchy  to the right of root) tend to 
lead to madness.

Perhaps it is time to resurect the bigz list for active discussion on how
to:
        identify what a big zone really is
        how to split a big zone

I'm not convinced that .COM needs closing... yet.

-- 
--bill